anastasia writes:
Why? WHY does it make you feel bad?
It is late but I wanted to make a quick point.
Humans are social animals - no escaping this fact.
One often feels good about doing an altrustic deed because of our social constitution that has surprisingly been forged in hellish furnace of selfish interests. This is notable.
One feels good about doing a good deed because it registers with our social or ethical makeup. Religion is not required to explain or accentuate this feeling or response - there are evolutionary explanations that explain the value of forming alliances within social constructs and even explain empathy and compassion. As complexity evolves the value of nonzero sum transactions increase. I don't have time or room here to expound on this right now and it is late.
The ability to feel the experience of others in your own consciousness is one of the great accomplishments of brain evolution.
That may sound horribly reductionist and depressing. However, I think the opposite is true, if not exciting and hopeful.
I believe that empathy and compassion are products of intelligence and self-aware consciousness. Empathy is an emergent property of intelligent life just like complex molecules are an emergent property of chemistry. Ethics based on empathy are built into the system.
If the game of life on earth was rerun it is unlikely that humans would result, but I believe the property of empathy for others and fellow creatures would emerge in a species that achieved our level of consciousness. I also think that if we encounter extraterrestrial life they would have this property - perhaps even more developed and uniformly distributed and they would view us like we look at other primates and see examples of inchoate altruism.
Edited by iceage, : No reason given.